hansjuliusschneider* sacredvaluesandinterreligiousdialogue · a&k...

A&K Analyse & Kritik 2017; 39(1): 63–83

Hans Julius Schneider*Sacred Values and Interreligious Dialogue

DOI: 10.1515/auk-2017-0004

Abstract: The paper develops a perspective on religion that is inspired byWilliamJames’ concept of religious experience and by the philosophy of language of thelater Ludwig Wittgenstein. It proceeds by naming basic steps leading to the pro-posed conception and by showing that none of them must be a hindrance for asubstantial understanding of religion. Among the steps discussed are the accep-tance of non-theistic religions, an existential version of functionalism, and theacceptance of the possibility of non-literal truths about the human condition. Fur-thermore, it proposes a way to interpret the expression ‘the sacred’ in the givenframework. Finally it points out two contradictory necessities that make interreli-gious dialogue difficult: In the beginning one has to use an abstract vocabulary inorder not to exclude any positions, but on the other hand one has to avoid robbingthe participants of the means for articulating their specific religious views.

Keywords:Wittgenstein, Ch. Taylor,W. James, religion, pragmatism, theism, func-tionalism, literalism, interreligious dialogue

1 IntroductionThe title of this paper signals a dilemma about which common sense demands adecision: Either (a) we want to take religion seriously. This seems to imply thatwe are ready to speak of a special realm, traditionally called the sacred. What issituated in this realm has an encompassing importance. It is not a means to someoutside end, but rather it might be called the end of all ends. It is precious in aspecial way; it is not negotiable. Or (b) we want to engage in interreligious dia-logue, i.e. we want to understand forms of life and of thinking about life that areas yet foreign to us, and we hope to thereby learn something about the humancondition, which often means to learn something about ourselves.

But seriousdialogue about religiousmatters presupposes that theparties con-cerned are able and willing to have their deepest convictions questioned, with notopics excluded. And here the dilemma occurs: Is it not one of the main functionsof the word sacred to signal just such exclusion, to signal that there is something

*Corresponding Author: Hans Julius Schneider, Institut für Philosophie, Universität Potsdam,Am Neuen Palais 10, 14469 Potsdam, Germany, e-mail: [email protected]

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that is not negotiable? So how can the concept of the sacred be retained when weengage in honest and truly open attempts to practice interreligious communica-tion? Does not the idea of Enlightenment demand that there be no taboos?

This paper will sketch the outlines of a philosophical understanding of reli-gion that tries to overcome this dilemma. Itwill proceedbynaming anddiscussinga number of steps that together are setting the course for it. And it will considerfor each of these steps, firstly, why it could be perceived as creating a stumblingblock, i.e. a barrier that makes the proposed approach difficult to accept for somereaders. And secondly it makes an attempt to show how each of these potentialstumbling blocks might be interpreted in such a way that it will no longer be ahindrance. The perspective of the following considerations will be philosophicalthroughout. It will not be the perspective of any particular religion.

2 Theistic and Non-theistic ReligionsThe first strategic step is to include into our considerations the possibility of non-theistic religions. The primary reason for doing so can be seen in the goal we haveset: We want to spell out the conditions for interreligious dialogue in an unbiasedway. Noworld-religion should be excluded for the sole reason that in its teachingswe do not find a personal god in the sense familiar to us from Judaism, Christian-ity, and Islam. So our step of opening the discussion to non-theistic religions ismeant as a step away from Ethnocentrism. Such a step should not be a hindrancefor anyone seriously interested in interreligious dialogue.

A prominent example for a non-theistic religion is Buddhism, and in our con-text it is interesting to note that it was this trait that had appealed to modernthinkers in the various historical waves of interest through which Buddhism be-came better known in the West. Some western philosophers found it easier to ap-proach the whole subject matter of religion via this non-theistic path, rather thanon their own cultural grounds of Christianity, because for them it seemed that onthis path they would not have to sacrifice their critical intellect. When startingthe inquiry with the problem of the existence or non-existence of the monotheis-tic god, on the other hand, the danger of bringing a sacrificium intellectus seemedto be more acute. So one reason for the interest that Buddhism found in the Westwas its perceived closeness or at least its non-oppositional relation to forms ofthinking that strive for a type of rationality as it is exemplified by the sciences (cf.Lopez Jr. 2008).

Indeed it seems to be a fact that for some people it is easier to take the firststeps of approaching religion when the question of theism is postponed.We often

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find that in philosophical discussions it can be helpful to put the question of god’sexistence not at the beginning of a discussion of religion, but rather at its end.Whenwe proceed in this order, the impression is avoided that as long aswe do nothave a proof for god’s existence (which is notoriously difficult if not impossible toprovide) it would be pointless to evenmake the first steps. In contrast, if we beginby trying to make sense of the concept of a spiritual life, even without gods, itmightnot takemuchof an elaboration tofindout that it is not sodifficult after all tounderstandwhat talking about gods (or about the one god) maymean, regardlessof the possibility of proving his existence. In this way, a proof of god’s existencecan no longer be seen as a condition that has to be satisfied before one can evenbegin a discussion about religion. This is in accordance with the way in whichWilliam James (1982[1902], 513–516) is proceedingwhen he starts his enquiry witha description of religious experiences and only after this adds his own ‘over-belief’(which he himself declares as optional), namely that the expression god signifieswhat is the cause of such experiences. We might add here that the work of Jamesis one of the main inspirations for the approach taken here (cf. Schneider 2006).

What are the possible dangers of the step to admit non-theistic religions? Ashas already been mentioned, it would be a grave misunderstanding if this stepwere taken as a criticism of those religions that do use a theistic language. Thespectrum of what we have to consider is enlarged by this step; it is not dimin-ished. To open a new and to some thinkers unfamiliar perspective does not meanto criticize or forbidmore traditional andmore familiarways of looking at religion.

As a bridge to the (for us) less familiar form of a non-theistic religion it mightbe pointed out to adherents of theistic religions that, although god is treated bythem in many respects as a person, it is very clear in the theistic traditions thatgod the creator is not at all a person like the neighbor next door. Strictly speaking,so one could argue, he is incomparable to human beings, and the kind of being heis, cannot really be grasped by us. This is a point oftenmade by Christianmystics,with the result that they were said to be atheists without themselves knowing this(Hume 1947[1779], 159). But if we feel that this accusation is not justified, stressingthe enormous difference between man and god can help us to understand thatthere are religious conceptions that go just one step farther: They not only say thatwhat one can be confronted with in religious experience is in important respectsvery much unlike any of the human persons one knows, but that one can have areligion that is not using the idea of personhood at all as a means for articulatingthe pertinent experiences.


3 PragmatismThe perspective advocated here can be described as a form of Pragmatism, in thephilosophical sense of this term, not in the loose sense of taking as true whateveris useful for oneself in the given situation. One of the roots of this philosophicalPragmatism can be found in attempts to solve certain problems in the theory ofmeaning. The pragmatic understanding of linguistic meaning, as explicated byCharles S. Peirce (1986[1878]), claims that we have to look at the practical contextin which a word, a doctrine, or a theory is used if we want to get at its meaning. Soto understand it’s meaning is to understand the way in which the word, doctrine,or theory guides human activities. The philosophy of language proposed by thelater LudwigWittgenstein, that plays a crucial role as one of the backbones of theview advocated in this paper can in this sense be described as a pragmatic viewof language (for a detailed interpretation cf. Schneider 2014). As is well known,he himself has epitomized his position in the slogan “the meaning of a word is itsuse in the language” (Wittgenstein 1953, §43).

Meanings of words, according to this view, are not the objects referred to, afact that is obvious in the case of non-referring but still meaningful expressionslike because, and, etc. Also meanings are not inner pictures or other kinds of rep-resentations in the minds of speakers and hearers. Instead, to understand what aword means, is to be able to use it in (typically social) human situations. And in adiscussion of religion we have to keep in mind that what we call the situation thata human being can be in (or, in a more general perspective that speaks of all hu-manbeings: the human condition) canbe very serious indeed.Whenwe look at thewhole of a human life, we see that it inevitably involves being sooner or later con-fronted with suffering and death. SoWittgenstein’s (1953, §7) term language gamethat he uses to characterize the interwovenness of linguistic and non-linguisticactivities should not mislead us to think that what he is talking about under thisheading is always playful or entertaining.

3.1 Existential Functionalism

It is clear that there can be no interreligious dialogue without making compar-isons between the teachings of different religions. For example one can ask: Howis the importance and the special humanmeaning of death articulated in a partic-ular religion, especially in connection with our ethical conduct and with our fearof death? Can the Christian teaching about a Last Judgment and aboutHeaven andHellmeaningfully be compared with the Buddhist teaching about Rebirth on dif-


ferent levels of quality, so that to be reborn as a rat or an ant, for example, is seenas less desirable than to be reborn as a human being of high spiritual quality, ofthe sort expected to be found in Buddhist monks? Is it for example plausible tosay that both forms of articulation teach that our conduct here and now makes adifference for the quality our life will have had in retrospect, when we have comeclose to its end?

If comparisons of this kind are not deemed illegitimate or impossible fromthe start, this means that we can speak of the function that particular teachingshave for the human lives they aremeant to enlighten and to influence in a positiveway, for example by taking away the fear of death. And with this way of speakingwe have indicated that we are looking from a pragmatic perspective in the philo-sophical sense just characterized. Must this perspective be seen as a danger forreligion?

The chosen example shows that speaking of its function does not necessar-ily mean that the religious teaching considered in this way is thereby belittled.Discussing their functions renders religious teachings not as less important thanthey have traditionally been taken to be. Especially, this way of speaking in it-self does not mean to make our understanding dependent on motives or circum-stances that lie outside the scope of themes belonging to religion proper, for ex-ample by claiming that religion has no other function than strengthening socialcohesion. For Charles Taylor (1981, 194) this is an example of what he calls “fi-nessing” the understanding a member of a foreign culture has of her activities.For our example this means: Both variants of speaking about death, the Christianand the Buddhist, can keep their full existential weight and can still be describedas functional. It is the function of the respective teachings to help their adherentsfacing the fact of their mortality, which includes considering the consequences ofthis fact for the question how they want to live, what they take to be of highestvalue for them. One can say that in both ways of speaking it is the whole of theperson’s life that is under consideration, and it is considered from the standpointof her own deepest aspirations, not from the point of view of another person or alarger social entity for which it might have been useful or useless.

The important point for interreligious dialogue is that speaking of functionsand comparing the ways in which different religions treat the same existentialpredicaments can be done in such a way that the religious teachings keep all theseriousness and weight they have traditionally had. This is why we speak of anexistential functionalism here.


3.2 The Practical Side of the Religious Life: Why Religion IsMore Than Philosophy

At this point it is helpful to formulate a tentative definition of the field. Thiswill show in which respect religions differ from philosophies and will give anadditional reason for calling Buddhism a religion, not a philosophy,—a pointthat sometimes is contested. The proposal put forward here is the following (cf.Schneider 2008, 13): Religions are forms of articulations and of practices thatnormally have a long history and that, according to their own ambitions, articu-late, and practically help their followers to achieve, an understanding of and anattitude towards human life as a whole which is honest and truthful. This meansin particular that it does not close its eyes to life’s unpleasant sides, like sufferingand death. And last but not least, it entails the promise that to follow its teachings(included what they teach about what is valuable) will bring to the followers adeep form of peace or bliss.

This last point deserves to be stressed here. As James has worked out in hisbookTheVarieties of Religious Experience, the followers of religious teachingswillexperience in their lives how these teachings help them or do not help them tomaster what happens to them. This is a very broad reading of James’ term reli-gious experience and in this sense all religious persons can be said to have suchexperiences. In his book, however, James concentrates on the more special mo-ments in which a person has an exceptionally strong feeling of seeing and accept-ing life as it really is and at the same time being in harmony with it, taking part inan “unseen order” (James 1982[1902], 53). In such a moment the person is able tosee not only the happy moments of life as a part of this order, but also sufferingand death. And to experience that she is able to view her life in this way is whatbrings the particular kind of peace to her, which James describes as “a superiordenomination of happiness, and a steadfastness of soul with which no other cancompare” (James, 1982[1902], 369).

The definition proposed above ismeant to be general enough to include all re-ligions: All of them articulate views of what the whole of a human life is or shouldbe, from birth to death. But, compared to philosophies, religions (including Bud-dhism) are offering something in addition that philosophies, at least in moderntimes, lack (cf. Hadot 1995). Religions aspire to help their followers to internal-ize the respective view in such a way that it has practical consequences for howthey act and how they perceive what happens to them in the chain of events thatconstitute their lives. The person concerned is enabled to act in accordance withthe religious view transmitted by the respective tradition, and this ability shouldinclude that she can accept life as it really is, what at this point means that shecan cope with its negative sides, she recognizes and does not suppress them.


This practical help on the way to attaining and keeping a certain vision ofwhat life is all about is an important aspect of what religious communities aredoing for their members, of religious rites and religious habits. They strengthenthe person’s ability to in fact live her life as far as possible in agreement with theparticular religious vision she shares and they contribute to her ability to live inpeace. This practical side of enablement is of no concern for today’s academicphilosophy but it is an important part of Buddhism, which for this reason shouldbe seen as a genuine religion, not as a philosophy.

4 Against LiteralismA further strategic step towards the conception of religion sketched in this paperis its opposition to Literalism. It opposes the position that demands from the faith-ful adherents of a religion that they believe in the literal truth of its main tenets.Many Christian believers and theologians today regard this as a matter of coursethat might not even be worth mentioning in our time, but this position is not uni-versally shared. There are considerable numbers of so-called fundamentalistswhoare afraid that giving up Literalismwould amount to giving up religious faith alto-gether. Their efforts to save their religious convictions can be quite emotional andcan also be very powerful. They in some cases lead to fanaticism and violence.

Sometimes an attempt is made to justify such attitudes and actions with helpof the argument, that what is at stake here is the sacred. If what we had remarkedin the paragraph about existential functionalism is convincing, such an attempt isnot altogether incomprehensible. One can see where the emotional energy comesfrom: In a certain sense what is at stake is the persons’ whole life as experiencedand understood by them; without this understanding life would become mean-ingless to them. In this sense one can say that it is their identity that is in dangerand they feel that if it is lost, nothing of importance will be left. But we know fromour own painful historical experiences that violence is no option as a means tosolve problems of the kind we are discussing here.

In order to make visible an alternative to fanaticism as a consequence of tak-ing religion seriously, it is an important theoretical step to make a distinction be-tween literal and other truths, without thereby diminishing the existential impor-tance of the latter ones. With help of this distinction one can see that many re-ligious truths are not (and do not need to be taken as) literal truths in order tofulfill their existential function. This is easy to claim, but it takes some philosoph-ical effort to explain how it is possible to have a deep and life-guiding religiousfaith, without making the additional claim that at least the most central religious


teachings, such as in Christianity that of the resurrection of Jesus, are literally true.Even an educated average church-goer would presumably have problems whenshe were asked to explain what exactly is wrong in the schoolboy’s definitionquoted by James (1979[1897], 32): “Faith is when you believe something that youknow ain’t true.” How can you bring yourself to believe something of which youwould nevertheless say that it is not true?

It would be unnecessarily hasty and not really helpful to immediately evadethe problem by speaking of a secret of faith here. Intuitively we might rightly feelthat at this point different conceptions of truthmust be in play so that what seemsto be a contradiction does not in fact have this character. But what exactly does itmean to speak of two different conceptions of truth, if what is intended should notbe a form of Orwellian doublespeak? In order to find a solution for this problemwe have to consider a few insights that we have already hinted at and that havebeen developed byWittgenstein and other authors in the philosophy of language.

4.1 Existence Claims, ‘Things’, and ‘Objects of Discourse’

We can start our discussionwith a simple question: Does there exist a prime num-ber between five and nine? The answer is, obviously, yes, the number seven. Howis that shown? It is shown by using very elementary arithmetical procedures likecounting, making multiplications, divisions etc. The partners arguing about thequestionmust be in agreement about the correctness or incorrectness in the stepsthat constitute these activities. Extending the pragmatic understanding of lan-guage explained above to the special case ofmathematical language, the proposalis that tounderstand themathematical expressions is to be able to carry out the rel-evant mathematical operations in such a way that an agreement is reached witheverybody else who has the same abilities. In short: Knowing how to act in themathematical realm is all we need to find the correct answer to the question con-cerning the existence of a prime number.

So also in the mathematical case we can say: to know the meaning of a con-cept is to know the way in which using it can guide our activities. The point of themathematical example is that such activities need not involve an acquaintancewith an entity by way of sensual perception. To be acquainted with mathemati-cal entities means to be a master of those activities that together define the fieldof mathematics, there is nothing that would be left out in this approach. Still wecan say that the number seven is an object; we can say true things about it (forexample that it is a prime number). And we can correctly say that it exists.

From this very simple case, situated far outside the domain of religion, wecan learn the following: To be an object and to exist does not always mean to be


amaterial object. Therefore we have to insist that there are very different kinds ofobjects and it would clearly be an illegitimate, indeed an ideological move to leg-islate that only material objects (or, in a broader perspective, objects of science)are objects in a serious sense; why should the objects of mathematics or, to giveanother example, of literary studies not be called objects in the full sense of theterm? So we can see that every realm of knowledge has its own criteria for justify-ing existence claims, and it is clear that the mathematical procedures convincingus of the existence of a prime number are quite different from the ways used toprove the existence of an object of, for example, astronomy or history, or the exis-tence of irony in a certain literary text.

One way of expressing this on a very general level can be the terminologicalconvention of distinguishing objects in the everyday understanding of things fromobjects of discourse. The latter category is the general one and it encompasses ev-erything we can speak about. It should be understood in such a way that it in-cludes the ordinary things, but also all the other objects of our concerns, like theobjects of mathematics, the entities of physics that are designated with help oftheoretical terms, the objects of psychotherapy, like the Oedipus Complex, etc.,etc. And of course one can ask what it is that religions make claims about, andthe same goes for theologies. For an answer, it is not necessary to refer to senseperceptions.

To be sure, practitioners of each of these fields have to be able to spell outfor their context what it means to speak in an intelligible, rational way and tomake existence claims good. In its traditional critical role, philosophy insists thattheymake themselves understood,whichmeans to say that they should not speakin vague or sectarian ways and they should not evade questions. But philosophycannot reasonably demand that the methods for making intelligible the claimsin the respective fields or to meet existence claims be the same in all cases (for amore detailed argument cf. Schneider 2016).

4.2 The Truths of Stories: Literal and Non-literal

We are now prepared to consider linguistic units larger than words and sentencesand thereby to move closer to the realm of religions. Especially we have to take alook at stories and theways inwhich they can be about something and can be truein what they say. There are at least two aspects that we have to distinguish here:Firstly we can move on a literal level and say for example that a particular storyis about a wedding festivity in a place called Kana, at which astonishing thingsare reported to have happened, and so on. And, secondly, it is common usage, tospeak not only about the objects and persons mentioned in the story on the literal


level, but also about the subject matter of the story as a whole. This second senseof aboutnessmight be characterized in a first attempt by saying that when we askwhat a story is about, we ask for the point it is trying to make, or (thinking ofreligion) we inquire about the function of telling it on certain occasions.

Of what kind can answers to such questions be? How canwe expresswhat thesubject matter of a particular story is, not in the literal, but in this second sense;how do we determine whether two stories (possibly quite different and stemmingfrom different cultures) speak about the same subject matter? Again we begin bylooking at a simple example outside the field of religion.

In his book The Uses of Enchantment the Psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim(1975) shows his readers that it can be highly important for children of a certainage to hear fairy tales told to them, because in a quite unreflective way they areable to pick up from these tales very important lessons about their situation,lessons that are vital for their mental development. For example, at a certain agea child may typically develop mixed feelings about her mother: She on the onehand loves her as she did before, but on the other hand in certain moments shesees her as wicked and so develops feelings of hate. The child then has difficultiesin handling those opposing tendencies that she cannot yet name, and, conse-quently, cannot discuss with her family in the way in which adult persons areable to do this. Since at the same time she is highly dependent on her elders, shemust find a way to come to terms with these difficulties, and whether she will besuccessful in this will largely depend on how the persons around her will react tothe behavior she will exhibit as a result of her mixed feelings.

It is Bettelheim’s claim that in a situation of this type the child is able to gainimportant insights from hearing one of the fairy tales in which twomothers playa role, like in the tale about SnowWhite: On the one hand there is the real mother,who is unquestionably good. But additionally there is awicked stepmother, tryingto do bad things to the child. So in the story the embarrassing mixture of feelingsexperienced by the child that produces in her a fear to be punished or abandonedbecause of her being bad, this mixture is sorted out by being cut up in two clearlydistinguishable parts. In the fairy tale there are two mother figures. And there aretwo different feelings that in the context of the story appear as quite appropriateat their respective place.

So one can say that the feelings are articulated by the story, i.e. the story pro-vides a name for them and it provides a context to which they belong. The storymakes them explicit and thereby determines their identity. Repeating the storycan become a means to remember them. Bettelheim says, convincingly, that thearticulation, the act of distinguishing kinds of feelings with the help of language,enables the child to make a step out of her embarrassment and fear, especiallywhen mother herself tells the story in such a way that it becomes clear that what


the child experiences is the normal course of events, that she is loved all the sameandwill not be punished, because going through this state of developing negativefeelings is the normal course of human life that can be handled by the family in alovingway and therefore does not have to be feared. So the child learns somethingabout the greater context of her situation that is comforting to her; she loses herfears.

Regardless of the details of Bettelheim’s account we can learn three impor-tant points from his discussion. The first is that stories like fairy tales have a levelof meaning that is distinct from and additional to the function they would haveif they were taken as historical reports, as descriptions of what had happenedsomewhere as a matter of fact, so that listening to them would be entertaining,perhaps, but would lack any further reaching significance. And, secondly, it is re-markable that the meaning the story possesses on this second level can be pickedup by the child in a direct way, without any special help or preparation, without ahermeneutical theory, quite spontaneously. Of course she must be able to under-stand the words and the grammar of the language used in telling the story. Thisenables her to understand the story on the first, the literal level, which in turn isa condition for being able to make the second step of grasping what is said on thesecond level ofmeaning. And in Bettelheim’s context this second level ofmeaningis the important one.

Sometimes this second,more-than-literalmeaning is called the symbolic one,but this is misleading because all language is symbolic. Also the termsmetaphor-ical or analogicalmeaning might mislead because for some readers they suggestthat the content expressed on this second level could also be conveyed in a non-metaphorical, literal way, and without making use of analogies. But this, as weshall see, often is not the case, neither in Psychotherapy, nor in Religion. Oftenthe respective subject matter of these fields is only accessible via non-literal usesof language. Therefore it seems best to keep the more complicated but less mis-leading expression and speak of a second level of meaning.

We had said that the story as a whole does not only speak (on the first level)about its protagonist, i.e. about the (typically invented) figure playing the centralrole in the story, like Snow White. But it also says something about the situationof the child listening to the story. From hearing the story the child is able to gainan insight into her own situation although it is clearly different from that of theprotagonist; normally she will not have a stepmother herself, she might not haveblack hair, etc. This capacity ofmaking use of a story for understanding one’s ownsituation although both situations are in some respects different should be kept inmind when in the next paragraph we will consider the uses, not of enchantment(as Bettelheim expresses himself in the title of his book), but of religious stories.These must be uses that we as adults are able or unable to make of them. It is a


claim of the view of religion sketched here, that for adults religious stories can beat least as helpful and as existentially important as fairy tales can be for children.

The third point at which we might be able to transfer an insight from Bettel-heim’s discussion of fairy tales to the field of religion is that for a story to behelpfulon the second level ofmeaning it is not necessary that it be true on the literal level.This strengthens our Anti-Literalism, as discussed above. We can see now that inBettelheim’s case to insist on Literalism would put many of the fairy tales that heshows to be helpful out of his therapeutic reach. Theywould be excluded becausethey contain ‘lies’, Literalismwould prevent them fromunfolding their existentialfunction. So it is the acceptance of the possibility of a non-literal level of meaningthat helps us to see that even fairy tales can convey important truths about humanlife.Wewill nowhave to seewhether also religious stories can convey truths abouthuman life and so can also be said to be true on a second level of meaning. Onlythen can it be claimed thatwe havemade a step beyond the schoolboy’s definitionof faith quoted above, without recourse to Orwellian double speak.

4.3 Ordinary Truths, the Truths of Science, and the Truths ofStories

Before we do so, however, we will use the distinction between the two levels ofmeaning for taking a short look at the relation betweenwhat might be called ordi-nary truths of everyday life, on the one hand, and truths of science on the other.Wewill see that this relation differs in important respects from the relation betweenordinary truths and the second-level truth of stories, which in turn makes it ad-visable to distinguish sharply between religious teachings and scientific theories.

We begin by looking at ordinary truths. They are those that concern our prac-tical everyday-affairs. Often they are literal truths for example about the stars to beseen at night, about money or about food. When we turn from them to the truthsof science, we can say that these latter ones are results of elaborations of humanactivities of inquiry that in much simpler forms also occur in our everyday-affairs.For example, astronomy tells us more and in a much more precise manner whatis happening in the world of stars, the first idea of which we have formed on thebasis of our own observations at night. An analogous point can be made for therelation between economics and the practice of going shopping, or for the relationbetween chemistry and the art of cooking.

The point to be made here is that in the cases mentioned the objects treatedcan in a broad sense be said to be the same in the ordinary and in the scientificcase. It is the same sugar that the chemist speaks about and that I use to sweetenmy coffee, I see the same star with my naked eye as the astronomer sees with his


telescope, and it is the samemoney that I have inmy purse and that the economisttreats in his theories. It is clear that this can be said only in a broad sense andwith respect to rather unsophisticated stages in the historical development of ascience. The only important point to be observed in our context is that, in the re-lationsmentioned, there is a continuity concerning the identity of the objects, andconsequently there is also continuity on the level ofmeaning. In contradistinctionto what we have observed in Bettelheim’s discussion of fairy-tales, the sciencescan be said to deliver more sophisticated versions of rendering the same objects,they are notmoving towhat in Bettelheim’s cases we have been calling the secondlevel of meaning on which we encounter new kinds of objects of discourse. The as-tronomer, for example, is obliged to stay on the first level of meaning, the level heshares with the claims a lay-person would make, only what the astronomer hasto say is much more accurate and in many ways richer that what a lay-person cansay, because the scientific form of description makes its claims in the context of atheory and on the basis of using telescopes with a highly complicated technology.

An attempt of a scientist to breach the ethics of his profession and move toa second level of meaning all the same, will bring him to pseudo-science; in thecase of astronomy this will be astrology: The astrologer has introduced into his de-scription of the stars an additional, ‘symbolic’ level of meaning onwhich he inter-prets their movements as expressing something about character traits of classesof human persons. In the context of science, this kind of adding a second level ofmeaning is illegitimate.

Put the other way around this means: Whenwe compare Bettelheim’s discus-sion of the function of fairy tales with what we have just observed about science,we can see that in Bettelheim’s case (and possibly in the case of religion) whatwe had called the second level of meaning cannot be described as the result of anelaboration, or a kind of enlargement of the scope that would take place on thefirst, the literal level of the story. The fairy tale, on the second level of meaning,does not treat the same objects that have been in view already in a less elaborated,or less artful form before. In this sense there is a discontinuity of meanings, andit is this discontinuity that gave reason to speak of two levels of meaning. Storiescan open up new realms altogether, they do not just treat the ordinary things ofeveryday commerce in a more sophisticated way, as science does. There are alsonew realms opened by science, to be sure. But they are new in a different sense.For example they may be realms of very small or very distant objects. But whenwe take these entities into consideration with help of microscopes and telescopeswe stay on the literal level of meaning, on the level on which we started.

It is for this reason that it is futile to expect to learn something about the tran-scendent or sacred realm that religions are said to speak about by looking at thelatest results for example in the science of cosmology. Cosmology constantly en-


larges the field of what we humans can see and know and it does so with thehelp of ever more advanced astronomical instruments. With these instrumentsone can explore new regions of space, one can transcend spatial limits that couldnot be trespassed in former times. But these instruments cannot transcend lim-its of meaning. They cannot help us to move from the first to a second level ofmeaning in the sense we have found in the fairy tales. Put in another way and an-ticipating what will be discussed in the next paragraphs: What is transcendent inthe religious sense is not something that is very far away in outer space.

5 The Subject Matter of Religious StoriesWe will now ask whether the concept of a second level of meaning will be of helpwhen it is transferred from fairy tales to religious stories. Spontaneously somereaders might be afraid that by taking such a step religious teachings will bedowngraded to the caliber of infantile stuff, not worthy of the attention of a ma-ture person. What we have said above about existential functionalism, however,should be a warning that also in this case such a dismissal might be too rash. Sowewill have to take a closer look at what the objects of discourse are that religiousstories, taken as wholes, are about. What is their subject matter, when we readthem not on the factual level of places or protagonists? What is it that they areteaching us about this subject matter? And how can we judge whether what theyteach is true?

5.1 Answers and Examples Provided So Far

So our first question is: What is the second-level content of religious stories thatcorresponds to what in Bettelheim’s case was a particular stressful situation thatcan typically occur in a child’s mental development when she begins to havemixed feelings about her mother? And in looking for an answer we should keepin mind that in the example given the story had the function to help the child torecognize her feelings, to contemplate and understand her situation and and tocope with serious problems; from her own perspective it would be adequate tosay: with existential problems.

There were some instances in the development of our argument that in retro-spect can be seen as at least partial or preliminary answers to this question. Forexample, we have spoken of taking into view thewhole of the person’s life, ormoregenerally, the human condition. We have spoken of existential predicaments that


the members of different cultures share and of the deepest aspirations of the per-sons concerned. As an example for what all human beings have to come to termswith, deathwasmentioned. Accordingly, for some religious storieswe can say thatthey are about themeaning of death for human life. For the individual person thismeans that she needs to accept her own death as a fact that she cannot escape.And of a religious story we expect that it can help her to do so. So we see that itis not the case that our considerations so far have not provided any answers at allto the question about the subject matter of religious stories.

There are two things to be noted, however, when we look back in this way.Firstly, it is remarkable that answers of the type just cited are located on a highlyabstract level. Anexpression like the humanconditionmaybe said to vaguelypointfor us into a direction rather than to name a specific subjectmatter. And, secondly,after rehearsing these abstract characterizations, it seems that the difference be-tween Bettelheim’s therapeutic concerns and the concerns of religious stories isnot that big after all. We will treat this second point first.

The most obvious respect in which religious stories are different from fairytales is that in the religious case the stories speak about life as a whole. They seemto speak from the perspective of an older person who is able to remember periodsof her life some of which lie in the distant past, but who is also able to anticipatethe future, including the state of old age and of approaching death. In contradis-tinction, the themes that fairy tales are treating are more specialized; they mightbe restricted to problems that are specific for a particular, usually an earlier age.

But apart from this difference we can see also much similarity: We had saidthat in the life of children the stories would have the function to help them to rec-ognize their feelings, to comprehend their situation and to cope with it. But thisis also what religious stories should do for adult persons and for the elderly ones,who are able to think about their respective lives as approaching completion. Itis hard to think of any reason why not, for young and for old people alike, thesituations that the respective stories are about, are perceived as very serious in-deed, as of fundamental importance for them, unless one wants to subscribe tothe outdated cliché of the naïve and constantly happy child who does not haveany serious problems anyway.

5.2 The Constitutive Character of Religious Articulations

We now come back to the first of the two points mentioned above. We had notedthat the answers given so far to the question what religious stories are about arelocated on a very abstract level. What this means can be seen most clearly whenwe return to the problems of interreligious dialogue and ask: How can we deter-


mine for two stories belonging to two cultures whether they speak (on the secondlevel of meaning) about the same subject matter?

At this point it is helpful to look at some highly pertinent observations madeby Taylor. He makes use of the familiar term conceptual scheme for expressing inwhat respects cultures may differ: They are using different clusters of concepts orconceptual schemes for treating the same or closely related human phenomena.He is aware that speaking this way brings certain dangers and says:

“We can see this when we ask the question, what does the concept ‘scheme’ contrast with?The term ‘content’ is certainly bad, as though there were stuff already lying there, to beframed in different schemes. There is certainly a deep problem here.” (Taylor 2002, 293)

Accordingly, Taylor tries to avoid the term content and, in an attempt to offer analternative, he says: “But the notion of two schemes, one target area remains validand indeed indispensable.” (ibd.) So target area should replace content; it signalsa movement in a certain direction. This expression, so we could say, introduces apragmatic aspect that fits well to the approach taken here. It can be taken to ex-press that the subject matter of religious teachings is not fixed and ready; we canhope to get hold of it (as far as we can do this at all) only in repeated attempts,in successive steps to get closer. Other expressions Taylor is using are “facet ofour lives” (ibid.) and “dimension, or aspect of the human condition” (Taylor 2002,294). Facets and dimensions and thewaywe perceive themmay change over time,as the history of religions and theologies testify. So these terms (as Taylor intendsthem to do) help to avoid the impression that the type of content we are consider-ing would be given, independently of our attempts to get hold of it. The proposedtermswould also help us avoid being too specific aboutwhat exactly it is themem-bers of a foreign culture want to express, and in this way they would help us avoidan ethnocentric perspective.

Using the human sacrifices made in the Aztec culture as an example, Tay-lor asks whether we could speak of their practices as exemplifying a religion. Hewarns:

“But the danger is precisely thatwe happily take on board everything thiswordmeans in ourworld and slide back to the ethnocentric reading of the conquistadores [this is the reading“While we worship God, these people worship the Devil”, Taylor 2002, 292]. So we perhapsretreat to something vaguer, like ‘numinous’, but even this carries its dangers.” (294)

With respect to the example, Taylor comes to the conclusion:

“But that theMass andAztec sacrifice belong to rival construals of a dimension of the humancondition forwhichwehave no stable, culture-transcendent name is a thoughtwe cannot let


go of, unless we want to relegate these people to the kind of unintelligibility that membersof a different species would have for us.” (ibid.)

And clearly, this is no option, neither for himnor for the approach advocated here.So our considerations lead us to the following result: When we attempt to en-

gage in interreligious dialogue, there are two options. Either we work with highlyabstract characterizations, i.e. with help of expressions like the human conditionor sentences like we all have to die. In a second step we can (as Taylor is doingin the Aztec case) carefully compare activities in the two cultures, in order to findout whether and in what sense we can say that they exemplify different versionsof what one is justified in calling religion.

Alternatively, we can try to make use of concepts, and other linguistic meanslike pictorial expressions and similes, that belong to our own culture and religion,as when for example we speak about a lost paradise, about sin, about Job’s con-troversy with God, or about the soul having left the body. These examples showthat there is a sense in which one can say that religious articulations have a con-stitutive character for their contents: It is impossible to explain what sin means,for example without recourse to a story. The same is true for some psychologicalobjects of discourse like the Oedipus Complex.

But if this is so, it would be an illusion to think that we could speak about arealm of the religious in the sense of a given, preexisting area that could be charac-terized in a neutral way, independent of all particular cultural traditions, unlesswe restrict ourselves to the highly abstract level on which we have moved above.Accordingly, we cannot say that all religions are speaking about it, about the reli-gious or the numinous or the sacred. To quote Taylor again: “The point is to bewareof labels here.” (Taylor 2002, 294) Not only on the first level of meaning, on whichpersons, places, etc. are described, but also on the second level of meaning theobjects of discourse, if we intend more than a highly abstract sense, are consti-tuted by the specific traits of our respective articulations and their long histories.As human beings we have no neutral, objective means to refer to them; we haveno ‘God’s-eye view’.

Still, we should not forget that we do have abstract ‘signposts’ like the humancondition. And we can see that the impossibility to give a detailed account of thesecond-level subjectmatter of religious stories in a neutral language does not hin-der us from making use of the particular stories that belong to our own traditionand that, on the second level of meaning, are about what cannot be characterizedwithout them. Like the fairy tales can do for children, religious stories can helpus adults to articulate and understand the predicaments we find ourselves in andto find a way to come to terms with them. And in our era of globalization it canbe helpful to attempt to understand stories that have been developed in foreign


cultures. And we can try to see ourselves in the light of these stories. Again: Noliteral truth is needed for their being helpful.

6 Religious Experience and the Realm of theSacred

We will now return to the question of truth and see whether our approach to re-ligion can put up with the provocative definition taken from James and quotedabove that “faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true”. Forour pragmatic perspective, the truth of religious teachingsmust show in their rolein helping us to live, and this in turn is a matter of religious experience, i.e. theexperience we make in using them as guidelines for leading our lives, for copingwith suffering and death.

Our discussion of topics from the philosophy of language and our discussionof Bettelheim have both shown that truth in religion (in the more than marginalcases) cannot mean the truth of a sentence as related to a simple fact. Instead, itinvolveswhatwe had called the second level ofmeaning ofwhole stories, the sub-ject matter of which is (on the abstract level of description) the human condition.So in order to prevent misunderstandings, we might avoid the label true, reserv-ing it for the first level of meaning, and, in the case of stories or other larger units,speak of adequacy instead. To have faith in a religious teaching then means tosee it as providing an adequate picture of the human condition. In the beginningsuch faith will be a kind of trust, when for example as a child we feel that our par-ents are trustworthy when it comes to handling situations that frighten us. Andwe have seen from Bettelheim’s discussion that to provide an adequate picture inthis sense does not necessarily mean to tell a story that is literally true, true on thefirst level of meaning. It must help us to cope; its adequacy is a practical matter.In this way Orwellian doublethink is clearly avoided.

Whenwe turn to religious experience nowwemight remind the reader thatwehad distinguished two senses in which one might speak of it. On the one hand allreligious people will experience in their lives how the particular teachings theyare trying to follow help them or do not help them to master what happens tothem. On the other hand (and this is James’ focus) there are special moments inwhich a person has an exceptionally strong feeling of seeing and accepting lifeas it really is. And it is vital for a religious experience that at the same time theperson feels in harmony with life as seen in such moments, that she feels thather life belongs to an unseen order. This includes that she is able to see not onlythe happy moments of life as parts of this accepted order, but also suffering and


death. And this perception is what brings a particular kind of peace to her, as wehad mentioned above.

Relying on a large number of testimonies that he had collected for this pur-pose, James makes it plausible in his book that it is indeed humanly possible toattain such a mental and emotional state. To believe that this is possible is animportant part of religious faith. It can also be described as a kind of ontologicalcommitment. James adds that, when they have been strong, typically such experi-ences have a long lasting effect on thepersons concerned. This, of course, doesnotdeny the possibility of moments or longer periods of doubt, or the possibility thata person will completely abandon religious views that she once had cherished. Inthis case we say that she has lost her faith.

There is one trait in James’ characterization of religious experience that is ofa special importance in our context because it provides a bridge to making use ofthe word sacred. It is the following: A religious experience in James’ sense typ-ically is something that will happen to the person undergoing this experience.More dramatically one could say: that will befall her. It will typically occur aftershe has given up her attempts to find rescue by way of her own activities. So thechange she experiences, her step to the state in which she can see and accept lifeas it really is and in which at the same time she feels to be in harmony with ahigher order,—this step is not the result of her own activity. On the contrary, oftenit comes as a surprise. If one wants to articulate this aspect of the experience, formembers of our culture it is natural to speak of a gift: What happened to the per-son is highlymeaningful and immensely welcome, but it is not a result of her ownactivities or of the intervention of another human being.

The theistic traditions express this by calling it a gift from god, given in an actof grace, and this, ultimately, is also the answer that James himself gives when hestates what he calls his own “over-belief”, i.e. his own interpretation of religiousexperience (James 1982[1902], 513; 516). But he makes it clear that other interpre-tations are possible and legitimate, for example to speak of a unseen order only,without considering a person-like actor who is active in this same order and whohas created it. The important point is that there is ‘something’ opposite, person-like or not.

If we now remember the sense in which we had said that in religious contro-versies we sometimes feel that what is at stake is our whole life, our identity as aperson, our deepest concerns, and when we see that there is no culturally neu-tral, objective way to say what the subject matter of religion is, except in a highlyabstract manner, so that, when particular questions have to be pondered, we can-not but use the traditional metaphors and pictures,—this is to say: If we have inmind the encompassing scope and personal importance of the religious experi-ences James speaks about and the fact that they befall us, that they are outside


the reach of our own activities, then it makes sense to say that such an experiencebrings us in contact with the sacred: A higher order of which we feel to be a part,an order that we can experience as meaningful and helpful, an order, however,that has not been instituted by ourselves or by any other human being, and ofwhich we can see that it cannot be accounted for by scientific or other ‘neutral’means in any detail. That we are able to feel ourselves as parts of this order, thatwe are able to accept and even welcome it over longer periods of time, this might(without being rash) now well be called a secret of faith.

7 ConclusionOnemore remark shouldbeadded. If this paper has achieved its goal, it has showna way of thinking positively about religion, a way that should be acceptable forall readers who bring nothing more to reading it than a philosophically educatedcommon sense. But, without intending it, the paper has also contributed to makevisible some of the theoretical reasons why a fruitful interreligious dialogue is noteasy to achieve.

Themain difficulty seems to be this: For the sake of a wide, inclusive perspec-tive it is necessary to begin such a dialogue on what has above been described asa highly abstract level, onwhich terms like the human condition are at home. Such‘signposts’ are helpful for making the first steps, but as soon as more particularproblems get into view, it becomesnecessary to use amore particular terminology,i.e. a vocabulary belonging to a particular religion, for example, one might wantto speak of sin. To be able to explain the meaning of this term, say to a Buddhist,one has to tell a story; in our case this might be the story of Adam and Eve.

But now we have to be careful: The recourse to the story must not be under-stood by the partner using it as thereby claiming literal truth for it, but as ameansfor communicating something on the second level ofmeaning, claiming for exam-ple something about the nature of human beings. Such a claim may well be artic-ulated in another form, say, with help of a different story; also it might be denied,partially or totally.

So we see that what above we had called the constitutive character of reli-gious articulations leads to a situation in which there are two opposite dangersthat have to be avoided. The one is to express oneself in such an abstract way asto approach emptiness. The other is that the speaker is so specific about the con-tent shemeans to express that she is understood as defending literalism, whereasher quite respectable motive is that she does not want to be robbed of the only lin-guisticmeans available to her. Discussing a very similar situation, inwhichunder-


standing the other requires one to be willing to make changes in one’s own self-understanding, Taylor offers the following consolation to which we have nothingto add here:

“Wemay still have a long way to go, but we will have made a step toward a true understand-ing; and further progress along this road will consist of such painfully achieved, particularsteps. There is no leap to a disengaged standpoint which can spare us this long march.”(Taylor 2002, 286)

Acknowledgment: I would like to thank Campbell Purton for checking my En-glish.

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